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GEORGE WILL can eat my Bermuda shorts.

I’m in the air right now, on a
Continental flight returning from a weeklong, sun-drenched family
vacation, so I’m missing the roundtable on ABC’s This Week, with Will no
doubt tut-tutting the significance of Gov. George W. Bush’s convincing
win in the Ames straw poll on Saturday night. Besides his appearance as
a professorial prig of the most foul order, you get the feeling that
Will doesn’t have much fun in life; he probably wears galoshes in the
shower.

As far as presidential candidates, I doubt many would meet with
Will’s sniffy approval, save Plato, Cal Ripken Jr. or maybe a pol who’s
currently paying his wife’s salary. In his Aug. 12 New York Post column,
headlined “Not Ready for Prime Time? George W.’s First Stumble,” Will
rapped the GOP front-runner’s knuckles for using the f-word so freely in
Tucker Carlson’s profile of him in Talk, a middlebrow monthly that’s
currently a hit on newsstands. Will scolds Bush for not demonstrating
presidential gravitas and criticizes him for telling the reporter he’s
not fond of reading 500-page policy documents.

Fine, the damage was done. Carlson spent days with the candidate, most
of it in May and June, when the Governor’s campaign was just starting to
unroll in public. Bush was more relaxed than was prudent with a member
of the press, even a pro-life conservative like Carlson whose primary
job is at The Weekly Standard.

But as I wrote last week, Will has never
liked the Bush family and never misses an opportunity to take a dig at
the clan. While Will admits that Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan “knew
the pleasures of salty language...But not in front of the children,
meaning the press,” as did Johnson, Kennedy, Nixon and Clinton (I’ll
give Carter a bye here), the uptight commentator is worried that Bush’s
Democratic opponent in the general election—barring some catastrophic
world event or huge personal scandal, it’s clear GWB will be the GOP
nominee—will have an advantage over the Governor. He writes: “Bush is
taking a political party along on his ride. He and it will care if on
Nov. 7, 2000, people think of Gore or Bradley as an unexciting but
serious professor and of him as an amiable fraternity boy, but a boy.”

What an idiot. After two terms of Clinton/Gore you’d think that Will, as
a conservative, wouldn’t be so obvious with his animus toward the Bush
family. I hardly think an “amiable fraternity boy” could’ve defeated
incumbent Ann Richards in Texas in ’94 and then won reelection in a
landslide four years later, capturing a huge minority vote. Someone
perceived as a “boy” doesn’t amass an historic number of campaign
contributions in his first run for president; or create an overwhelming
groundswell, both in boardrooms and in small-town America, to replace
the scandal-scarred, irrelevant President Clinton. Bush has admitted to
having a “reckless” youth; I’ll bet it wasn’t as “reckless” as he says,
but that’s what the Beltway press wants to hear. Will’s problem, I’m
certain, is that he was born in a bowtie, wearing glasses, and for fun
in college went to baseball games, scoring every play in his notebook.

Liddy

Indeed, as it turned out, Will focused on Elizabeth Dole’s third-place
finish, a surprising but ultimately meaningless moral victory. The GOP
simply isn’t going to back Dole. It has nothing to do with gender, but
rather her age and husband. Bush has charisma on the stump; Dole still
speaks like a sugar-coated automaton and has the continued embarrassment
of Bob Dole hawking Viagra on the tube. What the Beltway media, which
has denounced the Iowa poll as a free-spending sham, is missing is that
it does matter, even if no delegates were selected. As a result of
Saturday’s carnival Lamar Alexander will drop out of the race, Dan
Quayle will soon join him and John McCain has been left in the dust (if
you don’t compete in Iowa, forget New Hampshire). That’s not a
meaningless event. Bush will raise even more money now from Tennessee,
inheriting Alexander’s small core of supporters, and will campaign on
the high road for the rest of the fall, giving him time to fine-tune his
message. Forbes, who took just 20 percent of the vote, had to be
disappointed: He outspent everyone and came away with almost nothing.
Gary Bauer’s results had more significance.

Jake Tapper’s dispatch from Iowa for Monday’s Salon was particularly
amateurish, demonstrating that he’s a green political reporter who
unwisely is taking tips from the tired pundits he’s forced to consort
with. Consider this cliche-studded lede: “Gov. George W. Bush no doubt
will take some comfort from his victory in the Iowa straw poll on
Saturday, but he probably shouldn’t take too much.

“As former Presidents Pat Robertson and Phil Gramm, among others, can
attest, winning this early vote for president doesn’t mean that a
candidate will win his party’s nomination, let alone the whole enchilada
15 months from now.

“Still, it’s hard to argue against the fact that Bush—who first came to
Iowa only a few weeks ago, and beat second-place finisher/oddball
gazillionaire Steve Forbes by 10.5 percent—seems to be striking a chord
among voters.”

First, I’ll scream if I read one more cute reference in the media to
front-runners who didn’t make the cut—Presidents Romney, Muskie, Glenn,
etc. The joke is over and it wasn’t very smart to begin with. Second,
Jake, it’s reassuring that you’ve noticed that Bush “seems to be
striking a chord among voters.” That’s only been obvious since the
spring.

Finally, the reason the Ames poll was significant, and not the
“sham” that reporters claim, is because of the front-loaded primary
system that’s in place for 2000. Because this event was so far ahead of
the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, it became the de facto
first test of the large field of
candidates.

JWR contributor "Mugger" -- aka Russ Smith -- is the editor-in-chief and publisher of New York Press. Send your comments to him by clicking here.